Hi,
Picture this, the middle of winter at Nowra 1975, horizontal rain and as cold as. night flying had ended and it was about 0230, we had six hours of maintenance to do on the Wessex 31B's when a call came through for SAR. A woman had fallen and broken her leg, was expecting and an ambulance could not reach her as she was on a yacht 2 kms out to sea.
Roll out a helo, spread the blades and power up, only one doctor and one aircrew left so three of us were "volunteered" to go too. Before arrival the yacht had made it to a fishing wharf but the ambo's wanted us to fly her to hospital asap.
We landed to find out she was over 200kgs; in labor and had the left leg broken in two places.
We had to use two stretchers one turned upside down to carry her weight and it took all of us, aircrew(4),2 pilots and the four ambo's to get her into the Wessex(the doctor supervised???).
We then flew back to Nowra (HMAS Albatross) where our little forklift waited, unloaded her (done this before)and got her into the ambulance to go to the local hospital, oh yes she had a girl in the chopper, both well but all of us were exhausted and the maintenance crew we left behind cleaned out the Wessex it took a good couple of hours but smelt for weeks. for about a year we called that chopper "the baby carriage".
One of a few good stories.
Bob.